The last thing Marcus Webb remembered with any degree of clarity — the kind of crystalline, razor-edged clarity that only accompanies moments of absolute, catastrophic, life-ending significance — was the delivery truck.
It had been a FedEx truck, specifically. Which was ironic, because the package it had been carrying was, in fact, his package. A limited-edition Mortal Kombat 1 collector's statue of Noob Saibot, pre-ordered seven months ago, tracked obsessively through every stage of shipping, and refreshed on the tracking page no fewer than forty-six times in the preceding twenty-four hours. He had seen the truck round the corner of Maple and Fifth, had recognized the white-and-purple livery, had felt that specific dopamine spike that only a man who has spent three hundred and forty-seven dollars on a twelve-inch resin figure of a fictional undead ninja can truly understand — and he had stepped off the curb.
He stepped off the curb, and the truck, which had been traveling at a speed that was decidedly not consistent with a residential zone, had introduced the front quarter panel of its chassis to the full broadside of Marcus Webb's one-hundred-and-eighty-seven-pound body.
The physics had not been complicated. The physics had, in fact, been brutally, disgustingly simple. Mass times velocity equals Marcus Webb performing an involuntary three-quarter rotation through the humid August air of suburban Ohio before meeting the asphalt with the back of his skull in a manner that produced a sound not unlike a watermelon being dropped from a second-story balcony onto a tile patio.
He had been wearing a Scorpion t-shirt. The yellow one, with the "GET OVER HERE" text across the chest in that dripping, stylized font that he'd bought at a convention in 2019. His last thought — his absolute, final, terminal thought as a resident of Earth, of reality, of the mundane and blessedly non-fictional universe — had been:
Man, I didn't even get to open the box.
And then there had been nothing.
Nothing for what felt like a very, very long time.
And then there was everything.
Consciousness returned to Marcus Webb not gradually, not gently, not in the soft-focus, hazy-edged manner of waking from a deep sleep. It returned to him the way a freight train returns to a stalled car on the tracks — suddenly, violently, and with an absolutely devastating amount of sensory information delivered all at once.
The first thing he became aware of was the cold.
Not a normal cold. Not the cold of a winter morning or an over-air-conditioned office or even the cold of a hospital room, which would have at least made sense given that the last thing he remembered was being catastrophically struck by a commercial delivery vehicle. This was a different kind of cold entirely. This was the kind of cold that seemed to originate not from the air around him but from somewhere deep inside his own chest, radiating outward through his ribs and into his limbs like inverse sunlight, like his bones had been replaced with rods of frozen iron while he wasn't looking. It was a cold that felt intentional. Purposeful. As if the temperature itself had a personality and that personality was deeply, profoundly unfriendly.
The second thing he became aware of was the smell.
It hit him like a physical wall — a dense, layered, almost architectural tapestry of odors that collectively told a story, and that story was: You are not in Ohio anymore. There was the sharp, acrid bite of industrial pollution, the kind that coats the back of your throat and makes your eyes water, the unmistakable chemical signature of a city that had long ago sacrificed its air quality on the altar of manufacturing output and never quite recovered. Beneath that, the wet-stone smell of recent rain on old concrete, the kind of concrete that has absorbed decades of grime and exhaust and human misery into its very pores until it has become less a building material and more a geological record of urban decay. And threaded through all of it, subtle but unmistakable, the sweet-sick undercurrent of garbage — not fresh garbage, but established garbage, garbage that had been sitting in alleys and dumpsters long enough to develop its own ecosystem, its own territorial ambitions, possibly its own rudimentary system of government.
The third thing he became aware of was the fact that he was standing up.
This was, in Marcus's considered opinion, wrong.
He had been hit by a truck. He was fairly certain about this. The memory was not vague or dreamlike; it possessed the kind of high-definition, slow-motion clarity that the human brain reserves exclusively for moments of extreme trauma. He could recall the chrome glint of the bumper, the wide-eyed horror on the driver's face through the windshield, the specific way the "FedEx" logo had filled his entire field of vision in the last quarter-second before impact. People who have been hit by trucks at speed do not, as a general rule, wake up standing. They wake up — if they wake up at all — in hospital beds, surrounded by beeping machines and concerned relatives and doctors delivering grim prognoses with carefully practiced expressions of professional compassion.
They do not wake up standing in what appeared to be an alley.
And yet, here he was. Standing. In an alley. Upright. Vertical. His legs beneath him, his arms at his sides, his spine straight in a way that his spine had never been straight in his entire thirty-one years of life, because Marcus Webb had been the kind of person whose posture could most charitably be described as "apologetic" and least charitably described as "reminiscent of a question mark."
But his spine was straight now. Absolutely, perfectly, almost militarily straight. And that was strange. That was, in fact, deeply unsettling, because his body did not feel like his body. It felt better than his body. Stronger. Denser. More present, somehow, as if every muscle and tendon and bone had been replaced with upgraded versions of themselves, versions that had been precision-engineered and stress-tested and installed by someone who actually knew what they were doing, unlike whatever haphazard biological process had assembled the original Marcus Webb from a random assortment of his parents' genetic material.
He flexed his fingers.
His fingers flexed perfectly. Each digit curled and extended with a mechanical smoothness, a fluid precision that he had never experienced in his own hands. These were not the fingers of a man who spent eleven hours a day at a keyboard writing mid-tier marketing copy for a regional insurance company. These were the fingers of someone who had trained them, honed them, used them as instruments of something far more deliberate and far more dangerous than typing.
And they were covered in fabric.
Marcus looked down at his hands, and his brain — already struggling to process the truck and the death and the standing and the alley and the cold and the smell — was forced to absorb yet another piece of information that did not, in any way, fit into his existing model of reality.
He was wearing gloves.
Not normal gloves. Not winter gloves or driving gloves or even the kind of tactical gloves that he'd seen on military surplus websites during his occasional late-night internet browsing sessions. These were ninja gloves. There was no other word for them. They were form-fitting, seamless, and made of a material that he could not immediately identify — something that felt like a cross between leather and silk and something else entirely, something that seemed to absorb the dim light of the alley rather than reflect it, as if the fabric itself was actively hostile to the concept of visibility.
They were black. But not just black. They were a black that went beyond black, a black so deep and so total that looking at them was like looking at holes cut in the fabric of the visible spectrum. And woven through that impossible blackness, running along the knuckles and up the backs of his hands in subtle, geometric patterns, were threads of grey — not silver, not white, but a cold, flat, tombstone grey that seemed to exist in a state of perpetual shadow regardless of the angle of the light.
Marcus's brain, which was by this point operating at roughly the capacity of a laptop trying to run seventeen browser tabs simultaneously, did something remarkable. It recognized the gloves. Not from his own wardrobe, not from any store he'd ever visited, not from any piece of real-world clothing he'd ever encountered. It recognized them from a video game.
Specifically, it recognized them as something that should not exist in three-dimensional space, because they were a design element from Mortal Kombat.
Slowly — very slowly, with the careful deliberation of a man who suspects that moving too quickly might cause reality to shatter like sugar glass — Marcus looked down at the rest of himself.
The alley he was standing in was dark, lit only by the sickly amber glow of a distant streetlight filtering in from the mouth of the passage and the intermittent flicker of a dying neon sign mounted on the wall of one of the buildings that flanked him, but there was enough light for him to see, and what he saw made his brain perform what could only be described as a hard reboot.
He was wearing a full ninja outfit.
A full ninja outfit.
From the neck down, every square inch of his body was encased in a suit that looked like it had been designed by someone who had taken Noob Saibot's original Mortal Kombat 1 costume — that classic, clean, minimalist ninja aesthetic, all wrapped head coverings and simple tabard and functional martial arts practicality — and then fed it through the visual design philosophy of Scorpion's Mortal Kombat 9 appearance, which had taken that same basic ninja template and cranked up the detail, the texture, the sense of weight and physicality and menace by a factor of approximately one thousand.
The result was something that should have been a mess. A Frankenstein's monster of conflicting design languages. It should have looked like a cosplay accident, like someone had gotten drunk at a convention and tried to combine two different costumes with a hot glue gun and a dream.
It did not look like a cosplay accident.
It looked incredible.
The base layer was that same impossible black, tight against his skin in a way that revealed the contours of a physique that Marcus Webb had absolutely, categorically never possessed — the hard-cut definition of abdominal muscles visible even through the fabric, the broad sweep of shoulders that tapered to a narrow waist, the thick cords of muscle in his arms and thighs that spoke of years — decades — of physical training pushed to superhuman extremes. Over this base layer, a tabard of sorts fell from his shoulders to his mid-thigh, split at the sides for mobility, its surface covered in subtle geometric patterns that seemed to shift and writhe at the edges of his vision, grey-on-black, like watching smoke move behind smoked glass. The tabard was secured at the waist by a wide belt — again, black and grey, with a series of small, angular metal fixtures that might have been decorative or might have been functional; it was difficult to tell, because looking at them too closely made his eyes water in a way that felt less like a physical reaction and more like a warning.
His boots were heavy, thick-soled, with articulated sections over the toes and ankles that allowed for a full range of motion while simultaneously looking like they could kick through a concrete wall without the wearer feeling so much as a twinge. They were laced — or rather, strapped — with bands of that same grey material, crisscrossing up his shins in a pattern that was equal parts practical and ritualistic.
And his forearms — his forearms were wrapped in a manner that was pure, undiluted Scorpion. Layered strips of fabric wound from wrist to elbow, tight and overlapping, with small metal studs or clasps visible at regular intervals. The wrapping was immaculate, precise, the kind of detailed, purposeful binding that you saw on the hands of fighters who understood that the wrapping was not merely decorative but structural, designed to support the wrist and protect the knuckles and reinforce the striking surface of the fist for impacts that would shatter the bones of an unprotected hand.
Marcus stared at himself for approximately fifteen seconds.
Then he raised his hands to his face.
His face, which he discovered, was also covered.
The mask was — and Marcus's brain, despite its current state of near-total cognitive overload, still had enough bandwidth to appreciate this — a work of art. It covered everything from his collarbone to the bridge of his nose, a seamless expanse of that same light-devouring black material. It wasn't a simple cloth wrap; it had structure, a three-dimensional quality that gave it depth and presence. The section over his mouth and jaw was slightly thicker, slightly more rigid, with subtle angular seams that suggested armor plating beneath the fabric. And across the bridge of his nose, where the mask met the hood — because there was a hood, pulled up and over his head, framing his face in a cowl of shadow — there was a band of that cold grey, thin as a finger, running from temple to temple like a geometric accent line.
His eyes — the only part of his face visible — stared back at him from the reflection in a puddle of rainwater at his feet.
They were not his eyes.
Marcus Webb's eyes had been brown. A perfectly ordinary, unremarkable, could-lose-them-in-a-crowd brown. The eyes staring back at him from the puddle were white. Not blue-white or grey-white or any other shade that might generously be called a very pale color. They were white. Pure, featureless, solid white, with no visible iris, no visible pupil, just two almond-shaped voids of blank, luminous pallor set in a face of absolute darkness.
They looked like the eyes of a dead man who had refused to stay dead. They looked like the eyes of something that had crawled out of the negative space between nightmares. They looked like the eyes of Noob Saibot.
"What the fu—"
Marcus stopped.
He stopped because the sound that had just come out of his mouth was not his voice.
Marcus Webb's voice had been — and he was self-aware enough to acknowledge this — aggressively average. A mid-range tenor, slightly nasal, with the flat vowels and unremarkable cadence of the American Midwest. It was the kind of voice that telemarketers had, the kind of voice that blended into a crowd of other voices like a single beige tile in a floor of beige tiles. It was not a voice that anyone had ever described as "distinctive" or "memorable" or "the kind of voice that makes your skin crawl and your fight-or-flight response activate simultaneously."
The voice that had just come out of his mouth was all of those things.
It was two voices.
Or rather, it was one voice that sounded like two voices occupying the same space at the same time, layered on top of each other in a way that should have been cacophonous but was instead deeply, profoundly, existentially unsettling. The bottom layer was a deep, resonant growl — Scorpion's voice, that iconic, rage-soaked snarl that vibrated with barely contained fury and the promise of extreme, graphic violence. But laid over that, woven through it like smoke through flame, was something else. Something breathier. Something that sounded less like a voice and more like the memory of a voice, thin and distant and whispering, as if the words were being spoken from the bottom of a very deep well or from the far side of a very thin wall between the world of the living and whatever came after. Noob Saibot's voice. That eerie, almost-inaudible rasp that made subtitle text a necessity rather than a convenience.
The two vocal qualities should have clashed. They should have produced an incomprehensible garble, a meaningless layering of conflicting tonal qualities that would have made communication effectively impossible.
Instead, they merged into something that was simultaneously terrifying and cool as hell.
"What the fuck," Marcus said again, and listened to his own new voice echo off the alley walls in overlapping waves of growl and whisper, each word arriving at the listener's ear (which, in this case, was his own ear) twice — once as a snarl and once as a ghost, the snarl hitting first and the whisper arriving a half-beat later like a spectral echo, so that every syllable had weight and shadow, presence and absence, fury and void.
It was, objectively, the most badass voice he had ever heard.
It was also going to make ordering coffee an absolute nightmare.
Marcus — or whatever he was now — stood in the alley for a long moment, processing. He processed the truck. He processed the death. He processed the alley, the cold, the smell, the body that was not his body, the costume that was definitely from a video game, the eyes that glowed like lighthouse beams in a face made of darkness, and the voice that sounded like a demon doing ASMR during an earthquake. He processed all of these things, and then, because the Johnny Cage part of his brain — the part that he hadn't even realized existed yet — refused to let a moment this monumentally absurd pass without commentary, he said:
"Cool costume. Really digging the whole 'undead ninja chic' aesthetic. Very seasonal. Very Gotham."
He paused.
Then he said: "Wait."
Then: "Gotham?"
The word came out in that dual-layered voice, the growl and the whisper wrapping around the two syllables like barbed wire around a velvet pillow, and it hung in the air of the alley with a weight that was almost physical, because the word meant something. It meant something very specific, and what it meant was that Marcus Webb's situation had just escalated from "confusing and frightening" to "literally impossible."
Gotham was not a real place.
Gotham was a fictional city. It was the fictional city in which a fictional billionaire dressed up in a fictional bat costume and punched fictional criminals in their fictional faces on a nightly basis. It existed in comic books and movies and animated series and the imaginations of millions of fans worldwide, but it did not — it emphatically, definitively, categorically did not — exist in the physical, tangible, you-can-stub-your-toe-on-it real world.
And yet.
Marcus turned slowly on his heel and looked — really looked — at his surroundings for the first time.
The alley was narrow, flanked on both sides by buildings that rose upward into the night sky with the kind of oppressive, looming verticality that made you feel less like you were standing between two structures and more like you were standing at the bottom of a canyon carved from brick and concrete and despair. The architecture was Gothic — not in the Hot Topic, black-lipstick, The Cure-listening sense, but in the actual architectural sense: pointed arches over windows, decorative stonework carved into gargoyles and grotesques that glared down from ledges and cornices with expressions of frozen malevolence, flying buttresses visible on the taller structures in the distance, their curves silhouetted against a sky that was the color of a bruise — deep purple-grey, churning with clouds that seemed to glow faintly from within, lit by the reflected light of a city that never truly went dark because it was never truly at peace.
The buildings were old. Not quaint-old, not charming-old, not the kind of old that gets described as "historic" in real estate listings and used to justify a thirty-percent markup on rent. These buildings were tired-old. Sick-old. They were buildings that had been standing for a hundred years and looked like they'd spent every single one of those years in a losing fight against gravity, weather, neglect, and the specific kind of slow, grinding entropy that affects structures in cities where the municipal maintenance budget is perpetually allocated to "other priorities" because the city government is either corrupt, incompetent, or — in Gotham's case — both, spectacularly, legendarily both.
The brickwork was stained with decades of soot and chemical runoff, dark streaks running down the facades like mascara on a crying face. Windows were cracked, boarded, or missing entirely, replaced by sheets of plywood or plastic sheeting that fluttered in the damp wind like the flags of a surrendering nation. Fire escapes clung to the sides of buildings like metal parasites, their ladders rusted to the color of dried blood, their platforms sagging under the weight of accumulated debris — sudden newspapers, crushed beer cans, the occasional shopping cart that had somehow ascended three stories through means that defied explanation.
And everywhere — on every wall, every door, every flat surface that could receive it — graffiti. Layers upon layers of it, old tags buried under new tags buried under newer tags, a geological record of territorial claims and personal expressions and crude anatomical drawings and, here and there, the occasional piece that rose above mere vandalism into something approaching art. One wall, directly across from where Marcus stood, bore a massive spray-painted mural of a grinning face — white skin, green hair, red lips stretched into a smile that was less an expression of happiness and more an expression of the concept of happiness as interpreted by something that had never actually experienced the emotion and was working entirely from secondhand descriptions.
Marcus stared at the mural.
The mural stared back.
"I'm in Gotham," he said, and his voice — that impossible, terrifying, beautiful voice — filled the alley with layered echoes. "I died, and I woke up in Gotham. In a ninja costume. Looking like the unholy lovechild of Noob Saibot and Scorpion. In a DC Universe alley that smells like sadness and hepatitis."
He paused, let the absurdity of the statement settle.
"...Neat."
The first thing Marcus tried to do, once the initial shock had subsided — or rather, once the initial shock had been forcibly shoved into a back corner of his mind by the surprisingly dominant part of his new psyche that responded to existential crises with dry wit and aggressive nonchalance — was take off the mask.
This seemed like a reasonable first step. He was standing in an alley in a fictional city wearing a head-to-toe ninja costume that made him look like a boss fight from a fighting game, and the logical thing to do, the sane thing to do, was to remove at least part of the outfit and try to get a look at whatever face was lurking underneath it, because whatever face it was, it couldn't possibly be more unsettling than the current arrangement of glowing white eyes in a field of pure darkness.
He reached up, hooked his fingers under the edge of the mask where it met the line of his jaw, and pulled.
The mask did not move.
He pulled harder.
The mask continued to not move. It didn't stretch, didn't shift, didn't even wrinkle. It sat against his skin — or what he assumed was his skin; he was becoming less certain about the nature of what existed beneath the fabric with every passing second — with the immovable permanence of something that had not been put on but had grown there. It was not attached to his face the way clothing is attached to a body. It was attached to his face the way a face is attached to a skull. Fundamentally. Structurally. Non-negotiably.
"Okay," Marcus said. "Can't take off the mask. That's... fine. That's totally fine. I didn't want to take off the mask anyway. Who needs to take off masks? Not me. I love masks. Masks are my whole thing now. I'm a mask guy."
He tried the hood next. Same result. It was part of him, or he was part of it; the distinction seemed increasingly academic.
He tried the gloves. He tried the boots. He tried the belt. He even, in a moment of desperate experimentation, tried to tear the fabric of the tabard by gripping the hem and pulling with both hands, channeling every ounce of strength in his new, impossibly powerful body into the effort of ripping what should have been, at the end of the day, a piece of cloth.
The fabric didn't tear. It didn't stretch. It didn't even acknowledge the attempt. It just sat there, looking extremely ninja, being extremely permanent.
"So the costume stays on," Marcus summarized. "The costume is part of the deal. The costume is non-refundable. The costume is a load-bearing element of whatever the hell is happening to me right now, and removing it is not an option, and I need to just... accept that and move on with my life. My new life. My new life as a ninja in a fictional city."
He took a breath — a deep one, drawing the cold, polluted, garbage-scented air of Gotham into lungs that felt deeper and more capacious than any lungs had a right to be — and let it out slowly.
"Okay, Marcus. Okay. Let's figure out what we're working with here."
He raised his hands in front of him, palms up, and looked at them.
And that was when it happened.
The knowledge didn't arrive gradually. It didn't trickle in, didn't build piece by piece like a puzzle being assembled. It arrived all at once, a single massive download of information that slammed into his consciousness with the force of a tidal wave hitting a sandcastle. One moment he was Marcus Webb, thirty-one-year-old marketing copywriter with no combat training beyond a single semester of tae kwon do at age twelve that he had quit because the instructor yelled too much. The next moment he was—
Everything.
He knew everything.
Every fighting style. Every technique. Every stance, every strike, every grapple, every throw, every counter, every combination, every setup, every mixup, every frame trap, every punish. Not in the abstract, intellectual way that a fan knows these things from watching gameplay videos and reading wiki pages. He knew them in his body. In his muscles, in his joints, in the proprioceptive map of his own physical form. He knew them the way a concert pianist knows a sonata — not as a sequence of instructions to be consciously followed but as a thing that simply was, embedded so deeply in his neuromuscular architecture that conscious thought was not only unnecessary but would actually get in the way.
He knew Scorpion's Hapkido. The devastating joint locks, the brutal throws, the way the style used an opponent's own momentum against them, redirecting force with surgical precision before delivering strikes to pressure points and vulnerable joints that could shatter bone and tear ligament with terrifying efficiency. He knew the way Scorpion moved — that explosive, fire-fueled aggression, the relentless forward pressure, the hell-forged determination to close distance and punish.
He knew Noob Saibot's fighting style. The shadowy, deceptive movement patterns. The way Noob fought from angles that shouldn't exist, using afterimages and spatial manipulation to attack from directions that an opponent couldn't predict because those directions didn't obey the normal rules of three-dimensional space. The clones, the teleports, the portals, the sickle strikes. He felt the shadow energy inside him like a second heartbeat, cold and dark and hungry.
He knew Sub-Zero's cryomancy. He could feel the cold — not just the ambient cold of the alley, but a different cold, a weaponized cold, coiled in his core like a frozen serpent, ready to be unleashed in waves of ice that could flash-freeze a human body in milliseconds.
He knew Liu Kang's martial arts. The precise, disciplined kung fu, the flying kicks, the bicycle kick — the bicycle kick — the fire-infused dragon techniques that channeled chi into devastating columns of flame shaped like mythical beasts.
He knew Raiden's lightning. He could feel it crackling along his nerve endings, an electric potential that turned his entire nervous system into a weapon.
He knew Kitana's fan techniques. Mileena's sai work. Jade's staff combat. Kung Lao's hat. Kung Lao's hat. He could throw a hat and make it cut through steel and come back to him. He didn't currently have a hat, but if he acquired one, he could absolutely do that.
He knew Jax's wrestling. Sonya's Special Forces combat training. Cassie Cage's hybrid style. Kotal Kahn's blood magic. Erron Black's gunslinging. D'Vorah's... whatever D'Vorah did with the bugs. He knew it. He could do it. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to do it — the bug thing in particular seemed like it would be deeply unpleasant for everyone involved — but the knowledge was there, sitting in his muscle memory like a loaded weapon, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice.
Every single kombatant. Every single fighting style. Every single ability.
All of them.
At maximum power.
Marcus flexed his fingers again, and this time, when they curled, shadows peeled off his knuckles like black steam, wisping into the air before dissipating. His other hand, simultaneously and without any conscious effort on his part, briefly ignited — a flicker of orange-white hellfire that danced across his palm for half a second before gutting itself, leaving behind the faint smell of brimstone.
"Oh," Marcus said. "Oh, that's... that's a lot. That's a LOT of murder skills for one guy. That's an absurd amount of murder skills. That's an unreasonable—"
He was interrupted.
The scream came from the mouth of the alley. It was a woman's scream — high, sharp, ragged with terror, the kind of scream that is not performed or exaggerated but ripped from the throat by a fear so immediate and so visceral that the body bypasses all social conditioning and higher reasoning and simply produces sound in the desperate, animal hope that someone, somewhere, will hear it and come.
Marcus's head snapped toward the sound.
The movement was instantaneous. Not fast — instantaneous. One frame he was looking at his hands; the next frame he was looking at the mouth of the alley. No transition, no blur of motion, no sense of his head turning. It simply was in the new position, as if the intervening motion had been edited out of reality by a film editor with a very aggressive approach to pacing.
The Johnny Cage part of his brain said: Well, sounds like someone's having a worse night than us. Didn't think that was possible.
The Scorpion part of his brain said: Find them. Punish them.
The Noob Saibot part of his brain said: ... (This was because the Noob Saibot part of his brain communicated primarily in cold silences and a generalized aura of menace, which, while not verbally informative, was extremely effective at conveying intent.)
All three parts agreed on one thing: he was going to that scream.
He moved.
If anyone had been watching — which no one was, because the alley was empty and the hour was late and the residents of this particular block of Gotham had long ago learned that alley-watching was a hobby with a remarkably poor survival rate — they would not have seen Marcus run toward the mouth of the alley. Running implies a series of biomechanical actions: legs pumping, arms swinging, feet striking the ground in alternating rhythm. What Marcus did was closer to displacement. The shadows in the alley seemed to reach for him, embrace him, fold around him like a cocoon of living darkness, and then he was simply elsewhere — at the mouth of the alley, emerging from the shadows between one heartbeat and the next, like a jump cut in reality, like a glitch in the rendering engine of the universe.
The street beyond the alley was wider but no more inviting. A Gotham street, in all its grim, rain-slicked, sodium-lit glory. Cracked sidewalks lined with dead or dying trees whose bare branches clawed at the sky like skeletal fingers. Parked cars, most of them old, many of them dented or scratched or missing parts that cars traditionally require, such as wheels, doors, or the will to continue existing as functional vehicles. Storefronts with metal security grates pulled down over their windows, every grate tagged with graffiti, every window dark. A bus stop with a shattered Plexiglas shelter and a bench that had been bolted to the concrete with the kind of heavy-duty hardware usually reserved for securing industrial equipment against seismic events, because in Gotham, even the bus stop benches were flight risks.
And in the middle of all this urban poetry, approximately forty feet from where Marcus stood, a scene was unfolding.
There were five of them. Five men, spread in a loose semicircle around a woman who had backed herself against the wall of a closed pawnshop, her hands raised in front of her in a gesture that was equal parts defensive and pleading. She was mid-thirties, maybe — it was hard to tell in the sodium light — wearing a waitress uniform from what appeared to be a diner, a nametag still pinned to her chest, an apron still tied around her waist. She had been walking home from a shift. That much was obvious from context. She had been walking home from a late shift at a diner in one of the worst neighborhoods in one of the worst cities in the fictional DC Universe, and five men had decided that this was an opportunity.
The five men were exactly the kind of men that Gotham produced in bulk — the rank and file, the foot soldiers, the nameless, faceless thugs who populated the lower tiers of the city's criminal ecosystem like ambient wildlife. They were dressed in the unofficial uniform of Gotham street-level crime: dark jeans, heavy boots, hoodies and leather jackets, an assortment of cheap gold chains and cheaper tattoos. Two of them had knives — the kind of folding utility knives that you could buy at any hardware store for twelve dollars, unimpressive as weapons but more than adequate for their intended purpose, which was intimidation. One had a length of pipe. One had a baseball bat, aluminum, dented.
The fifth had a gun.
It was a pistol — a semi-automatic, from what Marcus could see, probably a nine-millimeter, held in a grip that suggested the holder had watched a lot of movies about people holding guns but had never received any formal instruction in the actual practice. His elbow was too high, his wrist was too loose, and he was holding the weapon sideways, because apparently Gotham criminals subscribed to the same school of firearms handling as the extras in a mid-2000s music video.
The woman screamed again, and one of the men — the one with the bat — laughed. It was an ugly laugh, the kind of laugh that does not express joy or amusement but rather power, the specific kind of power that comes from being in a group and knowing that the person in front of you is alone and afraid and has no options.
"Shut up!" the one with the bat said. "Ain't nobody coming for you, lady. This is the Narrows. Ain't nobody coming for nobody in the Narrows."
Marcus watched this from the mouth of the alley, forty feet away, wreathed in shadows that clung to his frame like loyal pets.
The Johnny Cage part of his brain: Five guys? Five? That's not a fight, that's a cardio warmup. That's less a combat encounter and more a light stretching exercise. I've had more challenging interactions with a jar of pickles.
The Scorpion part of his brain: They will burn.
The Noob Saibot part of his brain: ...
"Hey."
The word came out of Marcus's mouth — out of both layers of his voice simultaneously, the growl and the whisper, resonating through the damp night air with a quality that was less "sound" and more "environmental phenomenon." It was the kind of voice that didn't just reach your ears; it reached the primitive, lizard-brain survival center at the base of your skull and activated it like a fire alarm, flooding your bloodstream with adrenaline and cortisol and the overwhelming conviction that something very old, very dark, and very final had just noticed you.
All five men turned.
The woman turned too. Everyone turned. Even a stray cat that had been investigating a trash can across the street turned, arched its back, hissed, and then fled with the velocity and single-mindedness of a creature that had just realized it was sharing a block with something that out-ranked it on the food chain by several entire categories.
What they saw was this: a figure, standing at the mouth of an alley, wreathed in shadow. A figure in black and grey, angular and sharp-edged and wrong in a way that was difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore. A figure with glowing white eyes that cut through the darkness like headlights, like searchlights, like the last thing you see before the lights go out permanently.
One of the men with a knife — the younger one, who looked like he was barely out of his teens and had probably joined this little enterprise because peer pressure is a powerful motivator and critical thinking is a skill that requires practice — took an involuntary step backward.
"What the—" he started.
"Five of you," Marcus said, and his voice rolled down the street like distant thunder, like a whisper in a graveyard, like both of those things at the same time. "Five of you, one of her. Those are bad odds. For you."
The man with the gun — the leader, presumably, by virtue of having the most expensive instrument of violence — swung the weapon toward Marcus. The muzzle tracked across the distance between them, jerky and unsteady, because the hand holding the gun was shaking. Not a lot. Just a little. Just enough to be visible. Just enough to confirm that whatever primal alarm system the man's body possessed, it was currently going off at full volume.
"Who the fuck are you?" the leader demanded. His voice cracked on the last word, the pitch jumping up half an octave in a way that he clearly did not intend and that undermined the authoritative menace he was attempting to project. "You— you one of them? You one of the Bat's freaks?"
Marcus tilted his head. The movement was small, no more than fifteen degrees, but it was performed with a mechanical smoothness and an eerie precision that made it look less like a human gesture and more like a predatory animal reassessing the optimal angle of attack.
"I'm not with the Bat," he said. "I'm something else. Something new. And I gotta tell you..."
He took a step forward. The shadows moved with him — not following him, not being cast by him, but accompanying him, sliding across the pavement in tendrils and wisps that seemed to have their own volition, their own awareness, their own appetite.
"...you guys picked the wrong night to be terrible people."
The leader fired.
The gunshot was loud — shockingly loud, even by Gotham standards, a sharp, flat crack that echoed off the building facades and sent a flock of pigeons exploding from a nearby rooftop in a panicked flurry of wings and feathers and avian profanity. The muzzle flash was bright, a brief orange-white strobe that painted the street in momentary daylight.
The bullet traveled toward Marcus at approximately twelve hundred feet per second.
Marcus caught it.
Not "caught" in the metaphorical sense. Not "dodged" or "deflected" or any other word that would imply a normal, physics-respecting response to a projectile traveling at supersonic velocity. He caught it. His hand came up — again, not fast, not blurringly quick, but instantaneous, the movement occurring between frames of reality like a teleportation of limb — and his fingers closed around the bullet in midair with the casual, almost contemptuous ease of a man catching a tossed tennis ball.
He held the bullet up between his thumb and forefinger. Looked at it. The metal was warm from the friction of the barrel, slightly deformed from the spinning that the rifling had imparted.
"Nine millimeter," he observed, his voice carrying the tone of mild, professional appraisal. "Hollow point. Nice. Not nice enough, but nice."
He flicked the bullet aside. It pinged off the pavement and skittered into the gutter with a series of diminishing metallic clicks.
The leader stared at the space where the bullet had been, then at the hand that had caught it, then at the face behind the hand, specifically at the glowing white eyes that occupied the darkness above the mask. His own eyes were very wide. His mouth was open. He looked like a man whose brain had just encountered a piece of information so far outside its operational parameters that it had simply stopped, like a computer hitting an error message and freezing on a blank screen.
"What—" he managed.
Marcus was already moving.
The first thug — the one with the pipe — was the closest, standing approximately eight feet to the leader's left. Marcus closed the distance in a single step that covered thirty-two feet as if thirty-two feet were a minor suggestion rather than an actual physical distance, the shadows around his body unspooling and reknitting in his wake like the contrail of a dark comet.
What happened next was not a fight.
A fight implies two participants, roughly analogous in capability, engaging in a contest with an uncertain outcome. What happened next was more accurately described as a demonstration. A performance. A one-man show with an audience of five unwilling participants and one terrified waitress, in which the performer demonstrated, in exacting and visceral detail, exactly what happens when a human body is subjected to combat techniques designed for an entirely different fictional universe's power scale.
Marcus's first strike was a palm heel to the pipe-wielder's sternum. It was a technique that, in the Mortal Kombat universe, would have been considered a light attack — a jab, a poke, a move used to start a combo or interrupt an opponent's string. A move that, when performed against another kombatant — beings with superhuman durability, enhanced constitutions, and the ability to survive being impaled, decapitated, and set on fire on a semi-regular basis — would cause momentary stagger and approximately four percent health bar reduction.
Against a regular human being standing on a Gotham City street, it performed somewhat differently.
The palm connected with the man's chest, and Marcus felt the sternum give way beneath his hand with all the resistance of a saltine cracker beneath a sledgehammer. The man's ribcage collapsed. Not cracked, not fractured — collapsed, the bones of his chest compressing inward like a car being fed into a crusher, his entire torso deforming around Marcus's palm in a way that was simultaneously horrifying and — and this was the part that was going to haunt Marcus later, the part that he was going to spend many sleepless nights wrestling with — deeply, profoundly, disturbingly satisfying.
The man left the ground.
Not in the dramatic, Hollywood-stunt-wire way. In the Mortal Kombat way. His body launched backward as if shot from a cannon, traveling in a flat, horizontal trajectory that defied every rule of biomechanics and most rules of physics, crossing twenty feet of open air before hitting the brick wall of the pawnshop behind him with a sound — a WET, HEAVY, MEATY sound — that Marcus would later describe (to himself, in the privacy of his own skull, in the voice of Johnny Cage) as "the sound that a bag of soup makes if you throw it really, really hard at a wall."
The man slid down the wall, leaving a smear on the brickwork that gleamed dark in the sodium light. He did not get up. He was not going to get up. He was not going to do anything, ever again, because every single rib in his chest had been driven inward through his lungs and heart and spine with the force of Marcus's casual, barely-trying palm strike.
Marcus stared at the crumpled form.
The Johnny Cage part of his brain: Okay. Okay, that was... that was a LOT more than I was going for. I was aiming for "incapacitate." That was not "incapacitate." That was "obliterate." Those are very different things.
The Scorpion part of his brain: Good.
The Noob Saibot part of his brain: ...
And then, before Marcus could process what had just happened, before he could even begin to grapple with the implications of the fact that he had just killed a man with what he had intended to be a light, non-lethal strike, his body moved again.
Without his permission.
Without his consent.
His body turned toward the man with the baseball bat, and Marcus felt himself drop into a stance — low, wide, one hand forward and one hand back, the classic Scorpion neutral stance, and he felt the hellfire ignite somewhere behind his sternum and begin to travel down his arm toward his outstretched hand, and he thought, very clearly and very urgently: No no no no no, I don't want to—
His hand shot forward, and from his palm erupted a spear.
Not a thrown spear, not a projected spear, not any kind of spear that followed the normal rules of spear-deployment. It was Scorpion's spear — the iconic, signature, franchise-defining kunai-on-a-chain, except it wasn't a physical chain; it was a rope of condensed hellfire, blazing white-orange, unspooling from his palm like a fishing line made of concentrated rage, and at the end of it was a barbed, serrated, wickedly curved blade that sang through the air with a sound like a tuning fork made of murder.
It hit the bat-wielder in the center of his chest. Punched through his sternum, through his chest cavity, through his spine, and out the back of his jacket, the tip of the blade emerging from between his shoulder blades in a spray of dark fluid that caught the neon light and sparkled like terrible, terrible confetti.
"GET OVER HERE!"
The words ripped themselves from Marcus's throat with a force and a fury that he did not choose, did not control, and could not stop. They were not his words. They were Scorpion's words, the most famous two words in fighting game history, delivered in that layered growl-whisper voice with an intensity that made the nearby windows rattle in their frames, and even as he heard himself say them, even as the raw, primal, iconic power of that battle cry reverberated through the street and through his bones and through the very fabric of reality, a part of his mind — the part that was still, despite everything, still fundamentally Marcus Webb, marketing copywriter, Mortal Kombat fan, regular guy who had never so much as thrown a punch in anger in his entire life — was screaming: I DIDN'T MEAN TO SAY THAT! I DIDN'T MEAN TO DO THAT! WHAT IS HAPPENING?!
The chain retracted. The bat-wielder was yanked off his feet and dragged through the air, pulled toward Marcus with the irresistible force of a man being reeled in by a fishing line operated by a god. He arrived at Marcus's position in less than a second, and Marcus's body — still moving without his conscious direction, still operating on some deep, instinctual, combat-programmed autopilot — caught the man by the throat with one hand, lifted him off the ground as easily as lifting a pillow, and—
Oh no.
Oh no.
Marcus felt it building. Felt it rising in him like a sneeze, like a hiccup, like an involuntary biological function that the body performs regardless of the mind's wishes, regardless of context, regardless of the screaming internal protests of a consciousness that is fully aware of what is about to happen and is absolutely, categorically opposed to it.
A fatality.
A Mortal Kombat fatality was building in his body like a wave building in the ocean, gathering momentum and power and inevitability, and there was nothing — nothing — he could do to stop it.
"No," Marcus said, and his voice — that dual-layered, terrifying, awesome voice — was, for the first time, not threatening. It was pleading. "No, no, no, come on, don't— not the— please not the—"
His body did not listen.
His free hand ignited. Hellfire — true, genuine, Netherrealm-grade hellfire, the kind that burned at temperatures that the physical world did not normally accommodate, the kind that consumed not just flesh and bone but the essence of a thing, its spiritual residue, its metaphysical weight — erupted from his palm in a focused beam that punched through the bat-wielder's torso at the solar plexus and exited through his lower back, leaving a cauterized tunnel through his body that you could see daylight through.
Then, still holding the man aloft by his throat, Marcus's body pivoted, planted its feet, and ripped — pulling in two opposite directions simultaneously with both arms, one hand on the throat and the other gripping the man's belt — and the bat-wielder came apart.
He came apart like a thing that had been designed to come apart, like a perforated page in a notebook, like a pre-scored sheet of glass, with a sound that was indescribable and that Marcus would spend the rest of his existence trying not to remember and failing.
The two halves fell to the pavement in opposite directions.
Marcus stood between them, his arms still extended, hellfire dripping from one hand like liquid light, shadows leaking from the other like dark smoke, his glowing white eyes wide with horror that was invisible behind the mask.
"OH COME ON!" he shouted, and the dual-layered voice, despite its inherently terrifying quality, managed to convey genuine, desperate, almost comical distress. "A FATALITY?! I did a FATALITY?! I SPLIT A GUY IN HALF! THAT'S— that's Scorpion's MK9 fatality! 'Split Decision'! I just performed 'Split Decision' on an actual human being on an actual street in actual— well, FICTIONAL Gotham, but STILL!"
The remaining three thugs — the leader with the gun, and the two with knives — had not moved. They were standing exactly where they had been standing thirty seconds ago, but their postures had changed. They were no longer the postures of predators. They were the postures of prey. Of mice who had just watched a cat eat two of their friends in ways that mice had not previously believed were physically possible.
The leader's gun hand was shaking badly now, the barrel describing small, rapid circles in the air as the muscles in his forearm spasmed with fear. His face was a mask of absolute, paralytic terror — not the heightened, exaggerated terror of a movie character, but the real, raw, ugly terror of a human being confronted with something that his mind literally could not categorize, something that broke every rule he understood about how the world worked.
"Wh— what are you?" he whispered.
Marcus looked at him. The glowing white eyes, framed by the angular darkness of the mask and hood, fixed on the leader with an intensity that was almost physical, a weight of attention that you could feel pressing against your skin.
Marcus wanted to say: I'm nobody. I'm a dead marketing copywriter from Ohio who liked video games too much and got hit by a FedEx truck. I don't want to hurt anyone. I don't want to be here. I want to go home, except home doesn't exist because I'm in a fictional universe wearing a fictional costume with fictional powers, and nothing makes sense, and I'm scared, and I just SPLIT A MAN IN HALF, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to throw up except I don't think this body CAN throw up because I think it might be at least partially made of shadows and hellfire.
What he actually said, because his mouth — like the rest of his body — appeared to be operating on a script that he had not written and could not edit, was:
"I'm the guy who just turned your friend into a wishbone. You want to find out what I do for an encore, or do you want to run?"
The Johnny Cage energy was strong. Even in this moment of genuine psychological crisis, even as his mind reeled with the horror of what he'd just done, the Johnny Cage part of him — the part that deflected trauma with humor, that processed fear through a filter of irreverence, that responded to impossible situations by being so aggressively cool about them that reality itself felt embarrassed for trying to faze him — took the wheel and steered.
The two knife-wielders ran. They ran simultaneously, wordlessly, in opposite directions, their knives clattering to the pavement as they dropped them, their feet slapping against the wet sidewalk in a rhythm of pure, distilled panic. They ran the way prey animals run — not looking back, not thinking, just moving, putting distance between themselves and the thing in the alley mouth as fast as their adrenaline-flooded bodies could manage.
Marcus let them go. Or more accurately, his body let them go, which was a relief, because he had been genuinely terrified that his autopilot would chase them down and perform additional fatalities on them, and he was fairly certain that two fatalities was his limit for the evening, psychologically speaking.
That left the leader.
The leader, who still had the gun, and who, despite every rational signal his body was sending him — despite the shaking hands and the hammering heart and the pupils dilated so wide that his eyes looked black and the cold sweat that had plastered his hair to his forehead in dark, stringy tendrils — was not running.
He was not running because he was too afraid to run. There is a tier of fear above "fight or flight," a tier that most people never reach, a tier where the fear is so absolute and so overwhelming that the body's decision-making apparatus simply shuts down, like a circuit breaker tripping under an overload. The body freezes. The muscles lock. The mind goes blank, white, empty, a screen with no signal. This is the tier of fear that the leader had reached. He was standing still not because he chose to stand still but because standing still was the only option his body was currently capable of executing.
Marcus walked toward him.
Each step was deliberate, measured, theatrical. The shadows trailed behind him like a cape — or a shroud. His boots made no sound on the wet pavement. His glowing eyes left faint afterimages in the air, twin white streaks that lingered for a fraction of a second before fading. The hellfire on his left hand had gutted itself, but the shadows on his right hand were growing, spreading, darkening, reaching toward the leader like fingers — no, like tendrils, like the pseudopods of some lightless deep-sea organism sensing the proximity of food.
The leader made a sound. It was not a word. It was not even an attempted word. It was a sound that existed below the threshold of language, a vocalization that communicated nothing except the speaker's total, comprehensive inability to communicate anything.
Marcus stopped in front of him. Close. Very close. Close enough that the leader could see his own reflection in those blank white eyes — his own face, pale and sweating and twisted with fear, mirrored in two pools of featureless light.
"Drop the gun," Marcus said.
The gun hit the pavement. The leader's fingers had opened without any apparent input from his brain, the grip simply releasing, the weapon clattering to the wet concrete and spinning lazily to a stop against the curb.
"Good," Marcus said. "Now."
He leaned in. Close enough that the leader could feel the cold radiating from his body — not body heat, body cold, a chill that emanated from him like negative warmth, like the absence of thermal energy given physical form.
"I want you to run," Marcus whispered, and the whisper-layer of his voice was dominant now, the growl receding, leaving behind that ghostly, barely-audible rasp that seemed to come not from a throat but from a place between places, from the space where sound goes when it dies. "I want you to run far, and I want you to run fast, and I want you to tell every piece-of-shit mugger and thug and two-bit criminal in this city what you saw tonight. Tell them there's something new in Gotham. Something that doesn't arrest you. Something that doesn't tie you up and leave you for the cops. Something that FINISHES. THE. JOB."
He paused.
"Tell them I said..."
His body tensed. He felt it building again — the fatality, the compulsion, the overwhelming, unstoppable need to perform a finishing move. It surged through him like a riptide, pulling at his muscles, demanding expression, demanding the visceral, spectacular, choreographed violence that was apparently his new default setting.
No, he thought fiercely. Not this one. He's running. He's surrendered. I don't need to—
His right hand shot out, grabbed the leader by the front of his hoodie, and lifted him off the ground. His left hand ignited with hellfire. His right hand darkened with shadow energy. The two forces — fire and void, rage and emptiness — spiraled up his arms, meeting at his shoulders, mixing, combining, producing a sensation that was—
NO.
With an effort of will that felt like trying to stop a freight train with his bare hands, Marcus wrenched his body back under control. The hellfire guttered. The shadows retreated. His arms trembled with the strain of restraining forces that wanted — needed — to express themselves in the most dramatic and fatal manner possible.
He set the leader down. Gently. As gently as a body running on combat autopilot could manage, which meant the leader's feet hit the ground hard enough to buckle his knees, but at least he was intact. At least he was whole. At least he had not been subjected to a fatality, which, given the direction things had been heading, was a genuine accomplishment that Marcus felt he deserved credit for.
"Run," Marcus said.
The leader ran.
He ran with the desperate, graceless, arms-pumping, knees-high sprint of a man who has just been given a second chance at life by something that could have taken that life as easily as blinking, and who is determined to exploit that second chance by putting as much distance as possible between himself and the thing that granted it before it changes its mind.
Marcus watched him go. Watched the flailing figure disappear around a corner, the slap of his footsteps echoing and then fading, leaving behind a silence that was vast and heavy and filled with the smell of brimstone and the distant sound of the city's perpetual, low-grade mechanical heartbeat.
Then Marcus turned to the woman.
The waitress. The one they'd been mugging. She was still pressed against the wall of the pawnshop, her hands still raised, her eyes wide. But — and this was interesting, this was worth noting — she did not look as afraid as Marcus expected. She looked stunned. She looked awed. She looked like someone who had just witnessed something that her brain had filed under "impossible" and was now in the process of reclassifying under "actually happened, apparently, so we need to update our entire model of reality, which is going to take a minute."
"Hey," Marcus said, and he tried — he tried — to make his voice gentle, to soften it, to strip out the menace and the supernatural resonance and produce something that a traumatized civilian could hear without experiencing additional trauma.
It did not work. His voice came out as it always came out: the growl and the whisper, layered, dual-toned, sounding like a demon trying to be reassuring, which is, as a concept, fundamentally paradoxical.
"Are you okay?" he asked, and the question, despite being the most mundane, most human, most normal thing he had said all evening, sounded absolutely ridiculous coming from a seven-foot nightmare wrapped in shadows and hellfire residue standing between the two halves of a man he had recently split in half.
The woman opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"You..." she started. Her voice was shaking. "You just... he... they..."
"Yeah," Marcus said. "Yeah, I did. I, uh. I'm... working on the proportional response thing. It's... it's a process."
The woman stared at him for another long moment. Then, incredibly, impossibly, in defiance of all reasonable expectations, the corner of her mouth twitched.
"You— you caught a bullet," she said.
"Yeah."
"With your hand."
"Yeah, I did that."
"And then you—" She gestured vaguely at the area of the street that was best not looked at directly.
"Let's... let's not dwell on that part. Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?"
The woman shook her head slowly. "No. No, they... you got here before..." She trailed off, then refocused. "Who are you?"
And Marcus, standing in the sodium-lit darkness of a Gotham City street, wearing a costume he couldn't remove, speaking in a voice that wasn't his, inhabiting a body that he hadn't earned, carrying the knowledge of a hundred fatal fighting styles and the compulsive, involuntary urge to use them in the most spectacular and graphic manner possible, said the only honest thing he could think of:
"Honestly? I have absolutely no idea."
Then, because the Johnny Cage in him refused to let sincerity stand unaccompanied: "But I'm pretty sure I need a catchphrase. Something snappy. 'Get over here' is taken, 'I am the night' is trademarked, and 'it's morbin' time' was a mistake the first time around, so... I'm open to suggestions."
The woman stared at him.
"...I'll workshop it," he said.
Marcus left the waitress at the door of an all-night bodega three blocks away, a bodega whose proprietor — a stocky, mustachioed man in his sixties who was sitting behind a counter fortified with bulletproof glass and a baseball bat and the thousand-yard stare of a man who had seen everything and had stopped being surprised by anything approximately two decades ago — took one look at the shadow-wreathed nightmare ninja escorting a shaking waitress into his establishment and simply nodded, as if this was a thing that happened, as if glowing-eyed specters of death delivered traumatized women to convenience stores on a regular basis, and perhaps, in Gotham, they did.
"She needs to call someone," Marcus said to the proprietor, and the dual-layered voice made the bodega's fluorescent lights flicker in a way that was probably a coincidence and was definitely unsettling.
The proprietor pushed a phone across the counter without a word.
Marcus turned to leave.
"Wait," the waitress said.
He stopped.
"Thank you," she said. And then, quieter: "Whatever you are... thank you."
Marcus looked at her over his shoulder. The glowing white eyes, framed by the angular mask and the deep hood, should have been terrifying. And they were. But they were also, somehow, kind. Not warm — the word "warm" had no application to any aspect of Marcus's new existence — but kind, in the way that a guard dog is kind: protective, watchful, dangerous to everything except the thing it has decided to protect.
"Don't mention it," he said. "Seriously. Don't mention it. Because if certain people with pointy ears hear about this, my night is going to get a LOT more complicated."
He walked out of the bodega. The automatic door slid shut behind him. The fluorescent lights stopped flickering.
Outside, Gotham waited. Vast, dark, corrupt, and teeming with exactly the kind of people that Marcus's new body was apparently purpose-built to destroy in elaborate, unavoidable, fatality-grade ways.
He stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the skyline. Gargoyles looked back at him from a dozen rooftops, their stone faces frozen in grimaces of eternal displeasure. The clouds churned overhead, purple-grey and restless, and somewhere in the distance, barely visible through the murk, a searchlight swept the sky — a single beam of white cutting through the cloud cover, and at its apex, projected against the belly of the clouds in stark black silhouette, a shape.
A bat.
The Bat-Signal.
Of course, Marcus thought. Of course the Bat-Signal is up. Of course it is. Because this night wasn't complicated ENOUGH. Because what this situation really needed was the addition of a genius-level paranoid billionaire in a bat costume who is EXTREMELY territorial about people performing vigilante violence in his city, especially the kind of vigilante violence that involves splitting people in half.
The Scorpion part of his brain regarded the distant signal with neutral assessment. A warrior.
The Noob Saibot part of his brain regarded it with cold calculation. A potential obstacle.
The Johnny Cage part of his brain regarded it with the casual irreverence of a man who has faced down elder gods and interdimensional warlords and emerged on the other side with his sunglasses intact: Great. Batman. Just what every evening needs — a furry with trust issues and an unlimited budget.
Marcus sighed. The sigh came out as a layered exhalation, the growl-component producing a low rumble and the whisper-component producing a sound like wind passing through an empty cathedral, and together they sounded like a noise that a tomb would make if tombs could express exasperation.
"Okay," he said to no one. "Okay. New life. New universe. New body. Can't take off the costume. Voice sounds like two dead ninjas doing a podcast. Every time I throw a punch, someone loses a torso. And Batman is probably going to find out about this by morning, because Batman finds out about EVERYTHING by morning, because Batman is ridiculous and his surveillance network is ridiculous and this entire city is ridiculous."
He cracked his neck. The sound was disproportionately loud — a sharp, double-crack that echoed off the building facades like a pair of gunshots. His neck, like the rest of him, was apparently operating at a level of physical performance that made normal human anatomy look like a rough draft.
"So here's the plan. Step one: figure out the rules. What can I do, what can't I do, and — most importantly — can I do ANY of it without killing people. Because that's going to be important. That's going to be VERY important if I want to operate in the same city as a guy whose whole thing is 'no killing.' Step two: find somewhere to sleep. Or... do I sleep? Do I sleep now? Is sleep a thing that I do?"
He paused, checking in with his body. The body did not feel tired. The body felt ready. The body felt like it could fight for seven hundred consecutive hours and then fight for seven hundred more. The body felt like sleep was a quaint, nostalgic concept from a previous life, like cursive handwriting or landline telephones.
"Great. I don't sleep. Cool. That's cool. That's totally normal and not at all existentially horrifying. Step three: avoid Batman for as long as possible, because the conversation that's going to happen when Batman finds me is going to be DEEPLY uncomfortable, and I need more than one evening to figure out how to explain 'I'm a dead guy from another universe trapped in a ninja suit that makes me involuntarily perform ultraviolent finishing moves from a video game franchise that doesn't exist here' in a way that doesn't result in me being committed to Arkham."
He started walking. Not in any particular direction, just moving, because standing still felt wrong, felt impossible, as if his new body was fundamentally incompatible with the concept of inactivity.
His boots were silent on the pavement. Completely, unnaturally silent. Not quiet — silent. Zero decibels. A ninja's walk, each foot placement a precisely calculated interaction between sole and surface that produced no vibration, no impact, no sound. He could walk across a floor made of packing peanuts and empty chip bags and produce less noise than a shadow falling on a pillow.
The shadows followed him. They curled around his ankles, drifted in his wake, pooled beneath his feet a fraction of a shade darker than the surrounding darkness. They weren't doing anything overt — no tentacles, no claws, no grasping hands reaching up from the pavement. They were just... there. Present. Attentive. Like loyal pets. Like the darkness itself had decided that this particular entity was its representative in the physical world and had committed to following him around as a show of professional courtesy.
As he walked, Marcus conducted an internal inventory.
The abilities were all there. All of them. Sitting in his muscle memory like files on a hard drive, indexed and accessible and ready to deploy. He could feel them individually if he concentrated — feel the fire of Scorpion's hellspawn powers, the ice of Sub-Zero's cryomancy, the lightning of Raiden's divine energy, the shadow of Noob's wraith abilities, the green glow of Ermac's telekinesis, the brute force of Shao Kahn's war-hammer strikes, the psychic power of Kenshi's swordsmanship, the temporal manipulation of — wait.
He stopped walking.
Temporal manipulation.
Geras. The character who could manipulate time. Reverse it, stop it, loop it.
Marcus held out his hand, concentrating. The air around his fingers shimmered — a brief, barely-visible distortion, like heat haze, like looking through water — and then a small piece of litter on the pavement near his foot (a crushed beer can, Gotham Premium Lager, because of course Gotham had its own brand of beer and of course it was called something depressing) began to un-crush. The aluminum smoothed out, the wrinkles and dents reversing themselves, the can reforming to its original, cylindrical, un-crushed state over the course of about three seconds.
Then the distortion faded, and the can just sat there, whole and pristine, on the filthy Gotham sidewalk.
"Okay," Marcus breathed. "Okay. Time powers. I have TIME POWERS. On top of everything else. Because THAT'S proportional. That's a REASONABLE amount of power for one guy to have. Not excessive AT ALL."
He ran through the list in his head. Fire. Ice. Lightning. Shadow. Telekinesis. Time manipulation. Teleportation. Acid. Sand. Insect control. Blood magic. Soul stealing. Mind control. Cybernetic enhancements. Outworld sorcery. Chaos realm energy. Order realm discipline. Every elemental power, every supernatural ability, every exotic and bizarre combat technique from thirty-plus years of Mortal Kombat games, all packed into a single body, all running at full power, all apparently permanent.
He was, by any reasonable metric, one of the most powerful beings on the planet.
He was also, by that same metric, one of the most dangerous beings on the planet, because every single one of those abilities was locked at maximum output, and every single engagement — every fight, every confrontation, every encounter that escalated beyond the purely verbal — would inevitably, inescapably culminate in a fatality. A finishing move. A spectacular, ultraviolent, video-game-logic execution that would reduce the recipient to their component parts in the most dramatic fashion possible.
He couldn't hold back. He had tried — with the pipe guy, the first one, the palm strike. He had intended a light hit. A controlled strike. A "stop doing what you're doing" hit, not a "your ribcage is now inside-out" hit. And his body had delivered the second option, because the first option did not exist in its repertoire. His body was a Formula One race car being asked to parallel park. It was a concert grand piano being asked to play "Chopsticks." It was a nuclear warhead being asked to light a birthday candle.
Everything was a fatality. Every strike, every technique, every application of every power — they all operated at a level of lethality that was designed for beings who could survive having their skeletons ripped out and their heads exploded and their bodies torn in half by interdimensional portals. Against normal humans, against regular people, that level of lethality was...
"Horrifically, comically, UNREASONABLY excessive," Marcus muttered. "I'm a walking, talking violation of the Geneva Convention. I'm a war crime with legs. I'm a human rights violation in a ninja suit, and I can't even take off the ninja suit."
He paused at a street corner, waiting for a traffic light that he absolutely did not need to wait for, because there were no cars and he could teleport and also he was functionally immortal and a car hitting him would damage the car more than it would damage him. But he waited anyway, because the Marcus Webb part of him — the part that was still, beneath the layers of combat programming and supernatural power and borrowed personality, fundamentally a polite Midwestern man who followed traffic signals and said "please" and "thank you" and held doors open for people — insisted on it.
The light changed. He crossed.
And as he walked deeper into Gotham, deeper into the labyrinthine streets of the most dangerous fictional city in the most dangerous fictional universe, with every step carrying him further from the life he'd lived and deeper into the life he'd been given, Marcus Webb — dead man, reluctant ninja, involuntary executioner, accidental demigod — made a decision.
He was going to figure this out.
He was going to learn to control this body, these powers, these abilities. He was going to find a way to fight without killing, or at least without killing quite so spectacularly. He was going to navigate this universe — a universe of gods and monsters and billionaires in capes and clowns with crowbars and aliens and magic and all the other insane, wonderful, terrifying elements of DC Comics — and he was going to do it his way. The Marcus way. The Johnny Cage way. With humor, with style, with the kind of irreverent, unshakeable cool that comes not from not being afraid but from being afraid and cracking a joke about it anyway.
And if he had to perform the occasional fatality along the way...
Well.
He'd try to make sure the people on the receiving end deserved it.
"Alright, Gotham," he said, and his voice — that magnificent, terrifying, impossible voice — rolled through the empty streets like a proclamation, like a promise, like a warning.
"Let's see what you've got."
Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed. Somewhere closer, a dog barked. Somewhere above, on a rooftop he couldn't see, a gargoyle stared down at the street with its stone eyes and its stone grimace and its stone judgment.
And somewhere, in the deep, quiet, shadowed corners of Gotham's criminal underworld, in the dive bars and the crack houses and the warehouses and the alleyways where the city's worst inhabitants plied their trades, a story was already beginning to spread. A story told in whispered, shaking voices by a man who had run until his lungs burned and his legs gave out, a man who had seen his crew disassembled — literally, physically disassembled — by something that moved like smoke and hit like a meteor and spoke like the apocalypse clearing its throat.
Something new in Gotham.
Something that didn't arrest you.
Something that finished the job.
END OF CHAPTER ONE
NEXT TIME: Marcus discovers that Gotham's criminal element does not take well to warnings, Batman finds security camera footage that ruins his evening, and a trip to Crime Alley results in at least three more fatalities that Marcus ABSOLUTELY did not want to perform but performed ANYWAY because his body is a TRAITOR and physics is a SUGGESTION and proportional response is a CONCEPT that his fists have NEVER HEARD OF.